The Aether: Orchard by F. R. Edwards

The Aether: Orchard is the story of how it all began: Beto's arrival on Tura Prime with nothing but his father's plan and a hunger he didn't have words for yet, the deal struck over a stack of stakes that would bind two families to the same thousand acres for generations, and the blood orange rows that would one day be the only home a Navy family ever really had.

It's also the story of three teenagers — Grohl, Spike, and Ellara — thrown together in a Navy Aether program that has no framework for what they turn out to be. Assessed, studied, quietly turned into a research question by people who never asked their permission. Watching each other become something the classification system wasn't built to describe, while one of them decides, against every offer the fleet puts in front of her, that what she wants most is to go home.

This is the ground everything else grows from — the orchard, the choice, the family — long before any of it had to survive what was coming.